Alex Wilhelm

Disclosure: I own a minor quantity of shares in AOL, the parent company of TechCrunch, that were purchased through the firm’s employee share purchase program. My 401k and other accounts are invested into diversified global funds that include both equities and bonds. I own no other individual shares in companies, either private or public. I’m currently dating someone who works for a Google subsidiary.

Latest from Alex Wilhelm

Slight amendment: Apple closed today at an all-time split-adjusted high. The company traded for a higher per-share price before its split, but today marks Apple’s highest close since its 7:1 share exchange.
The company traded in the low 90s following the split, putting its current value up more than 10 percent since the division. Apple ended today worth $618.97 billion, according to… Read More

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing AT&T for having “misled” millions of customers who purchase “unlimited” data plans for their phones, only to have the carrier later drastically reduce the amount of information they could access.
According to the FTC’s complaint, AT&T throttled millions of customers tens of millions of times, sometimes after… Read More

Nexmo, a company that sells telecom services to developers, announced an early release of its new product ‘Verify’ today, a tool to help apps confirm the phone numbers, and therefore verify the identity of their users. Verify will formally launch in November, but developers can take part in an early-release program if they are in a hurry. Read More

This evening at a Wall Street Journal technology conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that in its first 72 hours, Apple Pay activated 1 million cards.
That figure indicates that Apple Pay is picking up traction outside of the technology, early-adopter set. Apple Pay competes with rival offerings from Google, among others, alongside traditional payment methods.
Paying for goods with your… Read More

Twitter has no short-term plans to monetize Vine, a social product that it purchased in its infancy.
The information was shared during the company’s earnings call, following a quarterly financial report that included stronger-than-expected third-quarter performance but soft guidance and user growth that investors found troubling. Twitter is down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading. Read More

Following the bell, Twitter reported its third-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $361 million and earnings per share, on a non-GAAP basis, of $0.01. The street had expected Twitter to report adjusted profit of $0.01 per share on revenue on $351.35 million.
Twitter, which broke from the market by falling nearly 3 percent in regular trading, is down sharply following its… Read More

Buffer, a social media management company, is raising a $3.5 million Series A round of capital. Most of the money will go to its founders and some early employees. $1 million of the total will be afforded to operations. To date, Buffer has raised $400,000.
Buffer, which has monthly revenue of just under $400,000, is profitable. The company wants to have enough cash in the bank to survive any… Read More

This morning, Microsoft announced that all Office 365 accounts will come with unlimited OneDrive storage. Gone are the 1 terabyte caps that were recently introduced. If you pay for Office, your storage is free.
It’s a good, if not surprising, move from Microsoft: The company has worked to improve the value profile of its Office 365, productivity-as-a-service offering for some time. Read More

Microsoft’s first quarter of its fiscal 2015 was big. The fiscal quarter, corresponding to the calendar third of 2014, brought stronger than expected revenue and profit. The company’s cloud business continued to grow, Windows Phone put points on the board, Surface took off and Office 365 picked up a grip of new paying users. Read More

In a sweeping transfer of power, Google CEO Larry Page will bequeath operational leadership of a host of core products to his lieutenant Sundar Pichai. Pichai, a well-known Google executive, will add control of Google+, search, maps, infrastructure and ads to his portfolio, which already includes Chrome’s browser and operating system efforts, Google Apps and Android. Read More

Amazon reported lower than expected revenue in its third quarter, and a larger than expected loss. Analysts expected the company to lose $0.74 on revenue of $20.84 billion. Instead, Amazon lost $0.95 per share on revenue of $20.58 billion.
That per-share loss works out to a net loss for the firm of $437 million. Read More

After gaining more than 1 percent in regular trading, Microsoft reported its fiscal first quarter 2015 earnings: Revenue totaled $23.20 billion in the period, leading to profits of $0.54 per share. The revenue figure represents a 25 percent year-over-year increase, a large piece of which is due to the Nokia hardware acquisition. Read More

In about an hour, Microsoft will release the results of its most recent quarter, the first quarter of its fiscal 2015. The company is expected to report revenue of $22 billion, and earnings per share between $0.49 and $0.55, depending on which set of averaged estimates you trust.
That will all come shortly. For now, let’s talk about Surface. Read More

Today after the bell, Apple reported its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, including revenue of $42.1 billion, and earnings per share of $1.42. Analysts had expected Apple to report profit of $1.31 per share, on revenue for the period of $39.85 billion.
During the fiscal quarter, Apple had net profit of $8.5 billion, up 13.3% from $7.5 Billion in the same quarter last year. Compared… Read More

Today in San Francisco, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and his lieutenant Scott Guthrie detailed the status of their company’s cloud efforts, breaking out a few growth metrics, and announcing several new features that they hope will spur growth.
Microsoft is hellbent to be a winner in the cloud space. With self-claimed $4.4 billion in yearly cloud run rate — expect a… Read More

If you own a Windows Phone, and you use Skype, and you are willing to update the Skype app on your Windows Phone, and you want to update the Skype app on your Windows Phone so that you can use the new Skype for Windows Phone feature, today is a pretty good day.
Well, it is if you want to draw inside your newly updated Skype app on your Windows Phone device. Read More

After recently managing to stuff two feet into his mouth at the same time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stopped by CNBC for a wide-ranging interview covering not only his recent comments on women in the workplace, but also his company’s bets on the cloud, and how Microsoft has long had an implicitly freemium business model. Read More

This morning at the first day of Disrupt Europe in London, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine sat down with FeeX’s Uri Levine to dig into how the new company is doing. Levine is best known for his work with Waze, a mapping service that Google bought in a 10-figure deal.
FeeX has raised a total of $9.5 million to date, including a $6.5 million Series B round of funding this August. FeeX… Read More

Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system preview has attracted more than 1 million testers to date, and tens upon tens of thousands of votes on its user forums. Curiosuly, one dominating theme has emerged over the past few days: Requests for better support in Iran.
The Verge’s Tom Warren wrote a post last week detailing the top 10 Windows 10 requests, noting that users are… Read More

Here in London, the Disrupt Europe hackathon is racing towards its conclusion, with its participants all prepping their presentations for judging later today. Last night, however, around midnight, fueled by a recent infusion of pizza and beer, TechCrunch went around to ask a few questions and cause a little mayhem.
Between a spider robot, far too many blinking lights and house plants… Read More